So too much happiness or happiness, for a protracted amount of time ceases to seem like happiness to us. We’d become used to it. It becomes the new norm. And so to feel happy again, we need to get to a new high point. And so the idea is pretty simple. I think it’s also true. We need to appreciate the downs of life in order to appreciate the high points.

Sean Murray  3:21  

That’s something I can relate to. And you talk about this famous thought experiment in the book by Robert Nozick that really brings this out. And maybe you could explain it. I think you call it the “pleasure experience machine”.

Andreas Elpidorou  3:35  

This thought experiment is given by Robert Nozick. It’s a very interesting idea. I introduced it often in my classes. I taught people about it. You have this machine that’s supposed to give you a life filled with happiness. The catch here is that you have to give up your life. But in exchange, you’re getting your life full of happiness. So, this thought experiment tests our willingness to give up our current life to a different one that is created by the machine. But it is also guaranteed to be a happy one. 

Now most people don’t like the machine. If you start thinking about it, will you hook up to a machine? I wouldn’t. And I think most people with whom I talk about the machine, they don’t want it either. And I think there’s some reasons that explain our apprehension. First, life in the machine doesn’t seem to be real or genuine. It is made up by the machine. And we’re concerned by that. And that shows that we don’t just want happiness or any sort of happiness. We want happiness that is based on reality. This might be hard-earned happiness took us a while to get there, but it’s real. We made it. We conquered it. 

And at the same time, I think people don’t just merely want happiness. Often we might be willing to sacrifice happiness for other things that matter to us. One of them might be the ability to do what we want in life. So the ability to be the author of my life, it’s important to me and I’m willing to give up some happiness in order to get that back. But the thought experiment shows that happiness might be good, but it isn’t sufficient. It isn’t the only thing that matters for the good life. There’s so much more to the good life than happiness.

Sean Murray  5:15  

The thought of getting hooked up to the machine, I couldn’t take the inauthenticity. I want my life to be authentic. I want relationships to be real. I want experiences to be real. And I’m willing to take the downside, in exchange to knowing that it’s a real experience. This is so that when I do experience the upside, it’s my own life. And so I think you’re really hitting on something important here. 

So we talked about the ups and downs of life are important, [and] that the periods of unhappiness are what make happiness so real to us. It reveals happiness creates happiness. The second thing that you’re hitting on here is that we want a life to be our own. We want to be the authority of our own life. We want it to be authentic. That means that we take on our own goals. We set our own priorities. We go after those priorities. It’s a bit of a struggle sometimes to get to those goals. I guess what you’re saying is that struggle is really important in happiness.

Andreas Elpidorou  6:18  

Yes, that’s correct. One of the points of the book is that our emotions do a lot of work for us. They help us when we struggle, but they’re not just there when we struggle. They’re there partly to get us out of those struggles. And so we have to work to help ourselves get to a better state when we have found below points, so we can get back to the high points and appreciate the transition. The transition is what it’s really important for us. It shapes our lives, gives us meaning, and makes us feel better. It gives us this feeling of authenticity and of meaningfulness. Once we have that, we also get happiness along the way.

Sean Murray  6:57  

You talked about the role of emotions. The case you make is that the emotions reveal. They’re ready- made. They develop and envelop inside of us, and we recognize them. There’s something authentic about emotions. They are clues. They come from our culture possibly or from nature, and they should not be ignored. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the role of emotion with happiness in seeking happiness.

Andreas Elpidorou  7:25  

This is a question that gets to the core of who we are as human beings. I think one of the essential elements of us is the capacity to experience emotions. As we go on and live our lives, we feel a lot of things. We get sensations and emotions. What happens is that, let’s take any example. Let’s take fear for instance, right? I experience fear when I see something or when I’m in close proximity to something that might be dangerous or harmful to my well-being. 

So in that case, I get this emotional reaction that triggers a whole set of behaviors in me. It tells me, “Look, this is something that might harm you”. And at the same time, it tells me or motivates me to do certain things. When we consider the whole host of emotions that we’re having. It’s difficult and sometimes might be overwhelming. But without that, it will be really hard for us to know how to live our lives. It will be hard for us to know when we are threatened, when something might be dangerous to our bodies, when something is boring or uninteresting to us. 

So we need all those clues. We’re fortunate not just to experience them, but to also be moved by them. So they contain more than just information. They’re powerful mechanisms that can take us from State A to State B. Hopefully, if we know how to get there and how to listen to them, then State B will be a better state than the one that we began.

Sean Murray  8:54  

You talk about three emotions that play a role in the good life: boredom, frustration and anticipation. I can understand the anticipation and the frustration, [and] how the struggle can lead to the good life. Boredom actually surprised me when it came up in your book, and you made a great case for it. Let’s start with boredom. What role possibly could boredom play in helping us achieve a good life?

Andreas Elpidorou  9:21  

I have to say, I’m happy that you are surprised. It means, I have something new to say in some way. I think the easiest way to see the value of boredom is to talk about pain and compare it briefly to pain. So consider pain. Pain is an unpleasant sensation. No one likes to be in pain or most of us do not. And we go to great lengths to get rid of pain. However, the capacity to experience boredom is good for us. It is a signal that warns us that damage has been done [to our] bodies. That can protect us from future or further damage until I conceive of boredom as playing a similar function in our life. 

First, it is again, a sickness, like most emotions, it deforms a sense of something. Specifically, boredom tells us that our current situation is not satisfying to us. It’s not fulfilling to us. It’s not meaningful to us. So it tells us that, “Hey, look what you’re doing right now, it’s not what you should be doing”. At the same time, and because we don’t like to be bored, and because we want to stop feeling bored, we do a lot of things to get out of that situation.

So boredom acts as its own driving mechanism to get us out of boredom. It’s a push that helps us get out of the unsatisfactory, unfulfilling or meaningless situation and into one that hopefully will be more in line with our desires, goals and wishes.

Sean Murray  10:51  

My father once gave me some advice and it always stuck with me. I was young, probably, 11 or 12 years old. I was bored and I mentioned this to my dad. He said, “You should never be bored because if you’re bored, that means you don’t have a goal. You could be using that time to achieve that goal”. That always stuck with me. And whenever I’m bored, I often think about that. Unfortunately, I haven’t been as bored recently as the past, or maybe I should say, “Fortunately, because of the phones that we have in our pockets that seemed to be the all, ubiquitous cure to boredom.” And I’d like to talk about both those things. Maybe we could start with the comment from my father. It seems to be in line with what you’re talking about.

Andreas Elpidorou  11:35  

Yes, I think it’s a great diagnosis of what goes on when we experience boredom. Boredom is there to help us find our goals and pursue them. Sometimes it might be our fault that we’re not chasing after our goals, but sometimes they aren’t. We don’t make up all our choices. We cannot completely determine our situation. Either way, often this might be a challenge if we’re not in control of our situation. However, it is important to know when boredom arises. It’s even more important to know I believe, *inaudible* arise. 

This relates to the second part of your question. If I’m bored because I’m commuting, and my bus is running late for instance. It tells me that I’m not there. I want to get to my destination so I’m not quite there yet, so I’m feeling bored. But if you’re bored with your occupation, with your job, with your family, with your partner, that’s a more serious signal. It tells you that there’s something deep about your life. It could be something significant that is just not giving you meaning or is not satisfying to you. We have to find a way of recovering this lost meaning and lost satisfaction. 

Boredom can only do certain things. It tells us, and it helps to give us this initial push. If we’re lucky enough, if we have the capacity to get out of our situation, then we can do it. Sometimes however, it’s going to be hard. I think that relates a little bit to the question about, are we less bored now with phones? Is it okay to use our phones? Is it okay to play apps and do games and all that?. I think, yes, as long as we know what we’re doing exactly. As long as we know we are distracting ourselves. And as long as the boredom that we’re fighting or trying to alleviate is not a symptom of some kind of untold profound lack of meaning or dissatisfaction with our lives.

Sean Murray  13:27  

It concerns me a little bit that we have this ready-made cure for boredom that we carry around with us because it could prevent us from asking those deeper questions from time to time. Not every time you’re bored, you pull out your phone, you need to ask that question. But I think I could see potentially someone who is experiencing the more serious kind of boredom. The boredom with a partner, the boredom with where they are in their life, with their career, their lack of goals, or their lack of struggle towards some higher status or some achievement. 

And if they’re constantly addressing that boredom or curing it with just playing a game on their phone, or looking at their phone, or looking at Facebook, years and years could go by. You’re not going to get back. That would be really sad for that person that they didn’t use that time more wisely. And maybe one reason they didn’t was because they weren’t forced to reflect. So I think that’s a concern there.

Andreas Elpidorou  14:23  

You’re right, and perhaps it can spiral in some kind of deeper emotional state or deeper existential crisis there. So if you start ignoring the signals of boredom, or if you’re unlucky or unfortunate, or incapable of dealing with it, it might change into something more long lasting. It can turn into depression of some sort. You can be deeply unsatisfied with your life, and that can lead to other complications. 

The study of boredom is and isn’t that new. But we do know that there are two types of boredom that we talked about in that study. There’s the boredom that we experienced. It could be when I’m waiting for the bus, or I’m trying to find something on television to watch, but there’s nothing, or waiting for a friend to come, and the like. 

There’s a more profound or more long-lasting boredom that is pretty much, “I’m bored with my life.” And we know that that kind of boredom is bad. There is a frequently found correlation between that type of boredom and depression. We want to read the signals of boredom early on if we can. We want to use boredom to our advantage before it turns into something more dangerous and more long lasting.

Sean Murray  15:32  

You tell a fascinating story in the book about Andy Warhol. He made a movie. I had not heard of this movie. It was called “Empire” in the 1960s. And you’d think, “Oh, Andy Warhol made a movie. It’s going to have visuals and be about pop culture. And it’ll be exciting, coming from this avant-garde artist whatnot.”. But actually, he pointed a camera at the Empire State Building, and it runs for eight hours and five minutes and nothing really happens other than just the camera pointing at the Empire State Building. People were running out of the theaters. 

They got so bored so quickly, demanding their money back. It just created this incredible reaction. Some people watched it and had these incredible experiences. What was he trying to achieve there? And what does that tell us about boredom?

Andreas Elpidorou  16:20  

Yeah, that’s a great question. I wish I had some profound thing to say. It’s such a wonderful use of boredom in art. I think we still don’t have a good idea of how boredom figures in art. We do know that a bunch of good art is boring. Slow cinema movies like “The Empire” have minimalist compositions, operas, or the ring cycle; Wagner’s, and all that. Those become boring because of the length of the way they’re composed and all that. 

I think different people use boredom in different ways, especially in an aesthetic context or if you’re a creator. It’s a very risky enterprise. So imagine you’re an artist and you’re intentionally creating something that you know is going to bore the audience, your viewers or the people that are going to come and engage with your product. You better be really good at giving them something else in return. You should allow them on their own to think about what this product or artwork is going to do for them. 

I think “The Empire” is one of those cases. It’s an experiment. It’s an avant-garde case. You go, you try to watch this. Are you really going to watch it for eight hours? Probably not. But can you get something out of it? Boredom might allow you to reflect on some aspects of what movies are. Some people talk about that. Warhol’s movie shows us that movies are about time or the passage of time in some way. Would you use that time to reflect about yourself? I think different artists are experimenting with this dimension of boredom and trying to get something out of it.

Sean Murray  17:52  

My guess is he was trying to get people to ask questions about themselves. He wants people to think about time and to think about their life and reflect in some way. There is a connection between time and boredom that you bring up. When we are bored, time moves so slow. It reminds me of the summers when I was younger, and I had so much time that I would be bored at times. It seemed like the summer would go on forever. 

And then other experiences through life such as when there’s a lot going on, and we’re in the middle of flow state, time seems to speed up so much. What’s going on there? There seems to be something about time and happiness too. I think you might be getting at it through this angle with boredom.

Andreas Elpidorou  18:29  

That’s a great point. I think the beginning of this book began with a thought. The thought was, what can we learn about ourselves when we reflect on the passage of time? I really wanted to explore this idea. What does the passage of time tell us about ourselves? The idea here with boredom is that you described it very well. When we’re bored, it feels like we’re stuck in the present. We just want to get over it. We just want to do something else. The present keeps dragging on. It’s true not just for boredom. 

But for a number of states of dissatisfaction, we don’t want to be in the present. We start thinking about the passage of time itself. That only makes the situation worse once you start focusing on how slowly time passes or that time doesn’t pass fast. But does it move fast? In this situation, it slows it down. 

And so I think this experience of being in a slow state or feeling stuck is a realization that we have somehow become disconnected from things that matter to us. Boredom is one of those signals. It is one of those realizations that what I’m doing right now is not what I want to be doing. I’m disconnected from the sources of meaning and satisfaction. We should really try to get out of that state. 

So reflecting on the passage of time, especially when he moves slowly. There are a lot of experiments and studies that suggest this idea that when you find yourself in such a situation, it is often a case or a symptom that we’re not happy, or we’re just not satisfied.

Sean Murray  20:13  

So the takeaway for me for boredom is that it’s a signal. It could be telling us that something is wrong, that we need to make a correction. We shouldn’t just ignore it. We shouldn’t push it away with our phone constantly. It is requiring us to reflect and ask a deeper question. 

Let’s move on to the next two emotions that you take up, that really makes this argument about happiness sort of propel us in our life, then guide and lead us to the good life. Let’s talk about frustration. What is it about frustration that can help us?

Andreas Elpidorou  20:46  

I think frustration is greatly misunderstood in some ways. I think it has a bad reputation and it shouldn’t. I believe that many things that we do in life, and many of our achievements have been fueled by frustration. In essence, and this is the core that I found in the book is that frustration does two things for us. 

First, it energizes us. Frustration is a negative experience. It is a negative emotion that arises when one of our goals become blocked. So, we want something, but we can’t get it. In the face of this obstacle or of this blockage, we become frustrated. However, this emotion is what fuels us. It motivates us. It energizes and allows us to keep trying to reach the goal. 

In addition, just like most of our emotional states, frustration is wonderfully informative about what matters and doesn’t matter to us. If we reflect upon the things that frustrate us, we find that, “I’m not frustrated by things that don’t matter to me. I’m frustrated by things that matter to me and I cannot get that”. I’m not frustrated by the fact that I cannot fly. But I will become frustrated if let’s say, I cannot write anymore, or if I cannot see my family or my loved ones. And so, where there is frustration, there is value.

Sean Murray  22:12  

You talk about this as an example. This video game that really caught my attention, “QWOP” by the net Foddy. He created a game. It’s sort of addictive. But the whole idea of the game is just so frustrating that people sort of love it. They love to be in that state of frustration because it’s that struggle. You’re moving towards, I guess, winning this game in some way. But there’s something about the human condition that really likes to be in that. We like to be in the fight. We like to be in the struggle. We want to be moving towards something. Frustration is preventing that and so we’re pushing against it. That’s a great insight.

Andreas Elpidorou  22:55  

Before studying and researching this book, I never thought that someone wants to design games. That their sole purpose, it seems, is to frustrate us. But there are a few of them out there. And there’s this special aesthetic quality to frustration. I think video games are a great context. You can be frustrated. They’re not high stakes there but we want it. You’re right to say that this perhaps points to something major or something more significant about our human condition. 

We enjoy the frustration. We enjoy the challenge. And if you’re a gamer, you want to be frustrated by the game because you want to feel that the game is hard or that it is challenging. There’s this element of frustration that invites people not to give up, not to stop playing the game, but to keep trying. And again, it is like being an artist trying to bore your audience to let them think of something else or something greater. 

If you’re a good game designer, you have to be careful with your dosage of frustration. You have to frustrate them to a certain extent. You don’t want to reach a breaking point where I’m going to start breaking my phone or throwing my computer away because I’m so frustrated. You have to give me enough frustration that’s going to keep me motivated. And I think games like Blob or QWOP, I don’t know how to pronounce it, and getting over it with Bennett Foddy are exactly like that. They’re really frustrating, but because they are addictive, you want to play them.

Sean Murray  24:23  

You have another example in the book which really struck me. I thought it was really fascinating, which is, “The Story of Andrew Wiles”. He was a mathematician who eventually solved a very famous proof called, “Fermat’s Last Theorem.” Maybe you could talk a little bit about what Andrew’s experience tells us about frustration and being sort of blocked towards achieving our goals, the role that it plays in happiness, and how it’s an important piece.

Andreas Elpidorou  24:53  

This is a fascinating story. It’s one of my favorite stories. It began many years ago. I think it began in the 1630s when a French Mathematician was studying an old Mathematics textbook called, “Arithmetic”. He was going through the problems, solving them, and considering them. He reached a particular problem which was pretty easy. It’s easy if you’ve done Math before It says, “divide a square number into the sum of two numbers.” And so, nobody thinks that this kind of problem would have given Fermat any difficulty. 

But what he did since the beginning, during his struggles, in the margins, he wrote a different problem. He said, “I found a truly marvelous proof to this far more complicated problem.” But unfortunately, the margin is too narrow to contain it. He didn’t write the solution or anything. And so what was the problem? 

The problem basically says that, “there are no three positive integers: A, B, and C that can satisfy the equation A to the nth power, plus B to the nth power, equals C to the nth power for any integer value M that is greater than two”. Once you start thinking about this, the beauty in Fermat’s challenge is that it’s pretty simple. You write it. It’s really easy to write it. 

In some cases, it’s easy to consider it. You just need to find the right numbers that satisfy the equation. At the same time, this task is almost impossible. Lots of people thought he would never solve it because it’s an equation about an infinite number of numbers. And so, lots of people tried, and it took about 350 years or so I think until Andrew Willis gave the first successful proof of Fermat’s Theorem. He proved [them] right. He never wrote it. But after a lot of work, we can have a solution. 

And what I emphasize in the book is what’s special about finally getting to the proof. I think what’s special about what’s interesting for our purpose is the fact that it couldn’t have been done without unexperienced expensive found frustration. Willis was trying to figure this out and went through protracted moments of frustration, and that’s what kept him energized. It gave his life meaning and gave the theorem such a central place in his life. This is all he wants to be doing. But it’s because it was a challenge or such a profound challenge, if it wasn’t frustrating, I don’t think anybody would have spent all this time trying to solve the problem. 

Sean Murray  27:36  

He said something very profound about being stuck. I think we can all relate to that. You go through some experience in your life, maybe you have some goal, something you want to achieve, and you’re working hard. But you get to a point where it doesn’t feel like you’re making progress. That’s the point where so many of us give up. That’s where frustration sets in. And it’s like, “I don’t think I’m going to make it. I’m going to give up”.  

Let me just read the quote, if I may so we can reflect. He said, “Now what you have to handle when you start doing Mathematics as an older child or as an adult is accepting this state of being stuck. People don’t get used to that. People find this very stressful. Even people who are very good at Mathematics sometimes find this hard to get used to. And they feel that’s where they’re failing, but it isn’t. It’s part of the process. And you have to accept and learn to enjoy that process”. I think there’s something very profound about that.

Andreas Elpidorou  28:40  

It’s a wonderful quote. It works for Mathematics. It works for most things in life. It fits so well with the theme. It’s this idea that when we find ourselves stuck there is boredom, frustration, even anticipation. I consider these states temporarily when we’re stuck. We have to deal with being stuck. We have to know what to do. 

Patience, in the case of Mathematics, or perseverance, and using frustration in a way to mobilize us. All those sorts of techniques that we’re going to use. It is part of life. We want flow but we cannot always get flow. So we need to understand how to operate, how to deal with the stops, and then how to restart a life. I think frustration is one of those tools that we have at our disposal.

Sean Murray  29:26  

What I took away from this section of your book about frustration is that frustration, like boredom is a signal. It’s telling us something. It’s a signal that we care deeply about something. I mean, when we’re frustrated with someone in our life, it’s because we care about them. Apathy is the worst emotion you could feel towards someone because it’s the signal that you really don’t care. But when you’re frustrated, you care. When you’re frustrated with your significant other or, as a parent, if you’re frustrated with a child or so forth, it’s telling us something. 

But the second part, and you talk a lot about it in this part of the book is that it’s the struggle and the sacrifice after the frustration, or to push through the frustration, or to push through being stuck. It’s that struggle and the sacrifice that leads to happiness. It leads to the good life. It allows us to feel like we’ve achieved something and just brings us that sense of joy. And so those two things for me, they go right after frustration in the process if you can push through.

Andreas Elpidorou  29:59  

There’s different ways of seeing that aspect of frustration. I talk a little bit about this very famous IKEA study, or it’s a study that shows an IKEA effect. This is a study that was done by Michael Norton and colleagues at Harvard University. It’s an ingenious study. What they did was they caught a bunch of participants and divided them into two groups. The first group was given an already assembled piece of furniture from IKEA. This was a box, so nothing fancy. [Just] a standard box. The second group was given the same piece of furniture, but this time they had to put it together themselves. They had to assemble. 

So the researchers gave the groups a core amount of time. The first group was just looking at it. The second group put it together. And then they came back, and they were like, “Okay, tell us how much money you’re willing to spend on the box to take it home with you.” And it turns out, in the experiment, that the second group, the group that is working in assembling the box were willing to pay more money. 

And that result should surprise us, right? And if we’re thinking, if we’re strictly economic beings, we’re thinking in this rational way. Assembling the box is effort And that should translate into cost. So at the end of the day, we’ll be willing to spend less money to get the box, but they didn’t. And we don’t. And I think that’s an indication that effort, difficulty, and frustration don’t take away things from us. But the *inaudible*, they make make things more meaningful and valuable to us. And we want them more, partly because we’ve invested resources in that because they frustrated us.

Sean Murray  32:10  

We want that experience. We want that struggle in some sense. It doesn’t make sense economically, which sort of blows your mind. It reveals something about how we’re wired. It’s important to take that into consideration when we think about our own lives and what we devote ourselves to. What we’re willing to sacrifice for what we’re willing to struggle for to push through. 

You also talk about the famous quote from George Mallory, the English climber. I think it was the 20s or 30s, so before Sir Edmund Hillary got to the top of Mount Everest. Mallory had several expeditions, and he was famously asked, “Why? Why are you trying to climb this mountain?”. It’s a deathwish. It doesn’t make any sense, at least to the reporter. And he said, “Because it’s there”. You said there was something really profound about that answer or maybe even more than what Mallory expected or was trying to say there.

Andreas Elpidorou  33:05  

There’s a lot of discussion about that answer. Those words might be the most famous words in the history of mountaineering. What does he mean by “Because it’s there”. It seems so obvious, right? I examined that answer through the lens of frustration. I think it basically means trying to figure out, “why climb?”, or in Mallory’s case, in the case of a lot of people climbing those mountains is, “why risk it all?”. And the answer can only partly be found in some objective structure that we call Mount Everest.

Of course he wanted to climb Mount Everest because it was there, or it is there. At the same time and more deeply, more fundamentally, he wanted to overcome a great challenge. And the challenge is to think that was there behind them. It took the form of Mount Everest, but it was a challenge that he set up for himself. It was the thing that motivated him. And because it was so challenging, it was an almost Impossible, unimaginable task, it was the test that drove him to do this. 

And so trying to understand that often when we ask ourselves, “Why do we do the things that we do?” I think often that behind the first answer that we gave lies a deeper answer. And that has to do with how we structure our lives, and how we place meaning into different components of our lives. Different objects in our lives have different amounts of meanings. And so frustration, effort, difficulty, challenge, all those things together help us structure our lives. 

And often when we say, “I do that because it gives them meaning,” that might be a different way of saying that, “I do that because it’s challenging. And I like that challenge. The challenge leads me to a life that is better with the challenge, not without the challenge in it”.

Sean Murray  34:47  

Let’s talk about that. The third emotion or emotional state, I should say, that can help guide us towards the good life. It’s anticipation. That feeling of anticipation for something to come. 

Andreas Elpidorou  35:00  

When I was studying anticipation, I found two major sources of value that speak to anticipation. The first one comes from existentialism. The second one comes from psychology and the cognitive sciences. Existentialism is or was a 20th century philosophical movement that concerned itself primarily with human freedom. What it means to live a free, authentic life. And a central aim of existentialism is that our lives are never complete. As long as we’re living them, they’re still lives in the making. And as a result, existentialists think that we’re always more than where we are right now. 

There’s a beautiful line in Beckett’s endgame where Clov asks: “You believe in the life to come”. Hamm responds saying: “Mine was always that.” And the first time I read that line, I thought, this is exactly right. There’s so much more to life than the present and our past. We always anticipate. We always wait for a future. That I think is not a bad thing. Who we are right now is defined partly by who we want to be. So say I want people to know about the book. To do that, I need to do something right now. I need to do something in the present. 

So my future desires what I anticipate to become, what I anticipate in the future tells me of what I need to do right now. Anticipating or running ahead of ourselves, is not a bad thing. It’s a necessary way of determining how to act. We need a clear conception of our future. That’s the source of value that I found in existentialism.  

There’s another source of value that I talked a lot about in the chapter that comes from psychology and the cognitive sciences. If you start looking at studies that consider our ability to anticipate and look into the future and look forward to the future, you find that anticipation is beneficial to us. 

Not only does it allow us to take pleasure right now, when I’m thinking about, “Well, I need a vacation. I can’t wait for it. I’m thinking about it right now”. It gives me pleasure. We also know, however, that anticipation provides us with a whole set of health benefits. It drives our lives forward. It gives us meaning. So overall, thinking about the future, it’s a benefit to us.

Sean Murray  37:18  

I think if we can be in a state of anticipation and enjoy that. It can be very helpful for bringing joy, meaning and purpose to our life. It gets to enjoying the struggle. It gets to enjoying the present. We know we’re moving towards something and we’re anticipating that. But in that that movement is where life really happens. It is in the present and in the moving towards that. We know that when we get there it will kind of bring this full circle back to the way you started. 

You mentioned how we habituate. Whatever state we’re in, it tends to become normal. So we know when we achieve that goal, maybe it’s writing a book, achieving a certain dollar amount in your bank account. When you get there, it’s going to become normal, and you’re going to set another goal. That’s okay. That’s part of the human condition. But the anticipation, again, is a sort of signal to say, “Hey, you’re on track”. And then for me, it’s kind of like, “Enjoy the moment you’re in”.

Andreas Elpidorou  38:21  

Thanks for that comment. I think there’s a little bit of pushback in that. It’s that’s good. I think it’s exactly right to say that we need to keep moving our anticipatory goals. That is when we anticipate things to happen, that is something that keeps moving. It’s a bad idea to anticipate, let’s say, I don’t know, “I need that much money in my bank account. That’s what I’m anticipating for”. 

And then, once you reach there, you stop anticipating anything else. I think part of the use of anticipation is that it’s always there no matter what. I wonder whether part of the question also has to do with, “Is it always good to anticipate, or would there be some times that anticipation might get us out of the happy present?” Is that to worry?

Sean Murray  39:08  

Yes, if you’re constantly thinking that happiness is in the future. It tends to take away from happiness in the present.

Andreas Elpidorou  39:17  

Yeah, that’s great. I think what’s important about anticipation or how to use anticipation right has to always come back to the present. It has to inform us about what we’re doing. It’s hard to describe it in some ways. I don’t think of anticipation as this free floating way of thinking or entity that just looks at the future at all times. 

It’s kind of an arrow that goes to the future and comes back. It tells me what I need to be doing in the present. So if I’m meeting my anticipatory goals, anticipation might tell me, “Keep doing what you’re doing,” in some way because I want more of that, or because that’s what I want. I want to spend more time with my family or I want to work on this more. 

We need to figure out a way of how we kind of played our future thoughts and our future goals in a way that always helps us move forward to that. And sometimes moving forward to that is just doing a little bit more of what we’re doing so that we don’t get used to it. We don’t become normalized. Not everything needs to be a great change. So it will depend on our situation on how to use anticipation.

Sean Murray  40:25  

In closing, let’s talk about movement because that’s something that you do come around to at the end of the book and your conclusion. It is around this idea that, “it is in the movement and movement towards our goals where true happiness lies or where we can find the good life”. Can you elaborate on that?

Andreas Elpidorou  40:44  

This is a way of seeing how the three states – boredom, frustration, anticipation all come together. I think they have a common aim. And their aim is to help us move. They help us get from one state to another. Boredom takes us from states of dissatisfaction and perceiving meaningless ones that are not. They’re hopefully more satisfying to us, or more meaningful to us. 

Frustration gives us the energy that we need to keep pursuing our goals, or in extreme cases, it might force us to give up those goals that we cannot achieve and find new ones. Anticipation, finally, gives us a clear view of the future. It helps us define ourselves in light of our future and become who we want to be. So, putting them all together is the struggle to keep ourselves moving. 

And we now know from decades of research that if you’re able to motivate ourselves to move from one state to another, we’re better adjusted. We have better chances of becoming successful in our jobs, having better interpersonal relationships. 

I think what’s key here is to try to move. To try to be on the move. Embrace the transition. Have goals and keep pursuing them. And that requires that unavoidably we’re going to find situations in which we’re stuck. But let’s not stop there. Let’s figure out how we can do the best we can. How we can utilize being stuck and the emotional reaction that we have to keep on moving. So if there’s kind of the tagline for this is just, “keep moving and use your emotions to take us where we want to go.”

Sean Murray  42:20  

Where can people find out more about you and your book?

Andreas Elpidorou  42:25  

They can visit my website at elpidorou.net. They can find information about my work, the research I’m doing, and also about “Propelled.”

Sean Murray  42:35  

This has been a wonderful conversation, Andreas. Thank you for being on The Good Life.

Andreas Elpidorou  42:40  

My pleasure. Thank you so much, Sean!

Outro  42:43  

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